Eulogy for a Lie
by The Dragon Mage
Summary: Naruto and Sasuke have both been shown the keys to their souls in the messages of others; lies shatter, but the shards are sometimes hard to see. A reflection on Sakura's confession and Danzo's death; mild implications of various Team 7 relationships.
1. The Soul and Center

**A/N: **Sooo… I was a lazy bum and had only read up to chapter 460 in Naruto. Then people on the internet told me that the latest chapters include zombie!Hashirama and Madara being a psycho with Kabuto, so I swore loudly and began to read.

Got to the love confession of Sakura, yadda yadda yadda… wait, did Naruto just turn down a girlfriend to chase some (albeit devilishly pretty) dude who hates his guts? Deary me, I thought to myself, this demands analysis. And then I read a little more, and there was snow and Sai actually interpreting people. Fic was needed. So, have my take on chapter 474, obsession and love. The psychological fic machine strikes again!

There is a day in the snow when the world shatters under Naruto, breaking like a distorted mirror, like the sheet of glass over a treasured picture, like a child's heart.

There is a day in the snow when the girl he loves tells him lies, and the stone-faced spy he so long resented presents him with the truth. There is a day when the whole shinobi world unites to protect him, save for the one person he wants by his side.

It is a strange day, although any day when Sai had to explain human motivation to Naruto would be strange. The snow falling in thick white flakes obscures the horizons of the world, muffling sound, staining Naruto's cheeks red and lending a burning, pale-blue glow to his eyes.

Sai tells him that Sakura means to kill their former teammate, and in that moment Naruto realizes the exquisite weakness of his own soul, the place in his heart that will mean his death, some day, or his redemption.

He had always thought himself strong, this golden, scruffy boy from the heart of Konoha's contradictory whole. He had always _known _that he was strong; had not he lived through betrayal and doubt and exclusion and loss, only to rise again, more determined than before? He knows his strength; it is the one thing Naruto has not doubted, not since his academy days when the world still rejected him.

But here, here is a crossroads in time where Sakura, girl of the crushes and shrieking and willingness to hold back from a fight, Sakura who (he thought) has only become strong to chase a boy she wanted; Sakura has bested him.

"She is willing to kill what she loves," says Sai, the enigmatic, oracular messenger, and Naruto is stunned to silence.

Sakura is prepared to give up the dream she has chased for so long in the name of the shinobi world, in the name of Konoha, in the name of peace. And he, Naruto, future Hokage, messiah with a message of sacrifice and unity; he cannot let go.

Does he love Sasuke more than Sakura does? No, no. They both love their broken, brilliant Uchiha, precisely because he is _theirs. _And their love is not so different, whatever trappings the world frames it in, whatever kind of passion colors it.

It is not love, or lack of it, that has tipped the scales in this measurement of strength and sacrifice. It is need. Naruto _needs _Sasuke, needs him now more than ever, while Sakura is just awakening to the fact that she does not require any handsome, elusive boy to be herself, and never has.

Naruto is a boy, a young man, of many ideals. His dreams are myriad; they encompass the whole world. But without Sasuke, they will all come down. Without Sasuke, he is nothing, and the battles he has won are empty victories against shadows in a dead land, robbed of all significance.

Sasuke, you see, is _proof_. If Naruto can win him back, if Naruto can pull even that tangled, revenge-driven soul out of the darkness, then his ideals are not mere charismatic luck; they are reality. If Naruto can get Sasuke back as his rival, as his friend, then it is proof that love _can _triumph over hatred, that the bonds of a shinobi can outlast any feud, that Naruto is not just a foolish boy chasing after fleeting, fanciful hope.

Saving Sasuke from darkness is proof that Konoha was not built in vain. And Naruto will fight for that proof to his last breath, to his last drop of blood. He would rather die than admit that some people will never be saved, because that conviction _is _himself, down to the center, to the core.

The murder of Sasuke Uchiha would be Sakura's emancipation; for Naruto, such an act would be the chains which imprison him forever within doubt.

And so it is that a few words from porcelain-composed Sai in the snow break Naruto Uzumaki easier than any trial he has ever faced. The boy who convinced a potential savior that his message brought only terror to the earth, the boy who fought Gaara of the Desert without fear and has faced death a thousand times; that boy cannot bear to hear a condemnation of the madman whom he loves.

Sakura had no self to offer when she begged Sasuke to stay. She was a creature of adolescent wants and with little understanding of the depths of lust and hatred. Now, she is a young woman ready to kill one dream for the sake of chains removed.

Naruto, who has plenty of self, enough to give the whole world his affection, enough to compare with the chakra of Kyuubi or the hatred of an abandoned, betrayed Uchiha; he has offered every ounce of it to Sasuke.

He has taken his resentment, his anger, his sympathy, his admiration and his devotion and set them on the altar which is Sasuke's place inside his heart. If Sasuke traded his body to Orochimaru in the name of power, Naruto has presented his a hundred times for Sasuke's sake. _Beat me, hurt me, give me the hatred which you bear to him and lay it out in marks upon my skin_; this he has said, this he has endured.

Everything; everything for Sasuke.

But Sakura cannot be seen to outweigh him in this balance of strength; his loyalty cannot be doubted by those who do not understand the ties between Sasuke and Konoha, between peace and reconciliation. The idea that the two of them would be partners in regaining the Uchiha, the faded photograph of a happy (or at least peaceable) Team 7 with all the future before them, together… it is a lie, now. This day has proven that.

So, under a white, white sky before the eyes of his two remaining teachers and Gaara of the Desert (who has grown to love him, as Sasuke has not) Naruto pledges to do what must be done. He says the words with his head bowed, with his voice low, yet that does not lessen the weight of them. Words are words, and he knows that every argument for Sasuke's death is reasonable and just.

But in his heart, Naruto knows the price. All his dreams shatter if Sasuke is unsalvageable. All his hopes come crashing down if this one task is impossible, if this one promise cannot be kept, even for the sake of the shinobi world.

Of course, there is hope. Naruto might be able to win Sasuke over, still. But the chance is slim, and the payment for failing is all he has, all he is.

And that; that is as it should be. Naruto Uzumaki has offered every passion of his heart and every pain of his body to the boy he loves. If his self and his dreams and his soul must go as well, so be it. He can do nothing less.


	2. Anger in the Dark

**A/N: **Behold an (unplanned) second chapter born of RAGE. I was reading the Sasuke/Danzo fight, and I thought, 'gosh, I just cannot sympathize with Sasuke anymore. He is so illogical and murderous and _immoral _that I cheered when the Raikage called him a bitch; it's so true!'

'But he isn't just an insufferable brat,' I told myself. 'There must be something making him do all this. What fuels the kid, anyway?' Here's my answer. Enjoy.

There is a day, amid stone and great roots beneath a vivid azure sky, when Sasuke Uchiha crosses a line he did not know was there; a line he cannot find for all the clarity of his preternatural sight.

There is a day amid the stench of battle when his lashing, wild hatred driven by grief and want and rage becomes the utter immorality of a murderer. There is a day when all that Sasuke once believed in is finally erased, leaving nothing and no one to stand guard over his soul.

Danzo Shimura was a strange man; a militant egotist in the manner of people who spend too long manipulating others, a collector of blind allegiance and false faith. He was a soldier, but he fought for his own reasons, and in the end may have regretted the paths he did not take.

Danzo, for all his contradictions, seemed to take delight in telling the absolute truth to Sasuke Uchiha on that day. _Yes, I killed your clan_, the message spills out, under the looming shadow of Susanoo. _Yes, Konoha did that. But you are a foolish, arrogant boy if you think that this revenge honors Itachi's memory or redeems the death of the family we took from you._

People have guessed much about the motivations of Sasuke, and each of the guesses are a little wrong, a little inaccurate, carrying just enough fallacies and good intentions that the young Uchiha slips out of them and runs away on his own path, uncaught and misunderstood.

Kakashi (and the rest of kind, ignorant Konoha) thought that what the boy wanted was revenge against Itachi. They were wrong; Sasuke longed for Itachi's attention, Itachi's interest, Itachi's acknowledgement of his worth, but hatred was never truly part of the subconscious cocktail. Kakashi, in the days of Team 7, did not know what his young student needed, and so could not stop the boy from running, running far away.

Itachi himself thought that by providing a scapegoat to hate Sasuke would be driven to excel and love Konoha. Itachi was a just and honest man, which is why he was dead wrong. Sasuke, faced with the murder of his family, did not hate the murderer in the manner of a just shinobi. Itachi hated the deed and hated himself, so he did not predict that Sasuke, emotional and distraught, would only want back the life he had led, the love he had known, the meaning which had given him strength.

Madara thinks that it is in Sasuke's nature to hate- he too is wrong, although not by much. It is Sasuke's nature to want purpose and security; to want a _reason _and an ideal; to strive. In the happy days before the massacre, Itachi was Sasuke's goal. Afterwards, things stayed much the same; Itachi was still a goal, although longing had transmuted into obsession and repulsion by the strange alchemy of lies.

Now, when the truth of his older brother is revealed, Sasuke's goal is hatred; but he does not hate because of some in-built rivalry of Senju and Uchiha- he hates because hate is all he has.

This shattered, incoherent boy with a blazing mangekyou sharingan and bleeding eyes can only be himself through _wanting_. The focus of his identity is external; he needs to be doing something, _being _something, for the sake of another human being; he cannot value existence for its own sake. Unlike Naruto, his true opposite, Sasuke does not strive for the sake of striving; he moves onward because to be without a vendetta is to lose all sense of who he is.

Orochimaru, snake in the dark that he was, knew Sasuke best of all the teachers, friends and brothers who have tried to pierce his heart. Orochimaru, who had long ago memorized all the motivations that lead little boys to sell themselves for power, knew that Sasuke's revenge was not justice but selfishness, not hatred but _need._

Orochimaru, however kept secrets, and so the first person to tell Sasuke the truth of his own heart is an enemy on the battlefield, a murderer of his clan, a Konoha patriot. Danzo speaks out of vindictiveness and an attempt to weaken his opponent, but the things he says hold no hint of the old lies always told.

Danzo is perceptive, in this instance. Sasuke _is_ an overly passionate, stupid and selfish boy to seek revenge on Konoha. If Sasuke truly loved Itachi, if he truly understood the purpose and immensity of his brother's sacrifice, then he _would_ go home and serve the village until the day he died, suffering its justice and being thankful for it.

But Sasuke _needs_, he needs so much, and therefore he kills and kills and kills in the name of his desire.

There is a day when the young Uchiha prodigy is told the truth. And on that day he does not hear it, choosing instead to shriek and attack in rage, as he always does. An old lie, a collection of old lies, shatters, but no one notices the breaking.

This is also a day when Sasuke acts another new truth, again without observing its ascendancy. He murders Karin to reach Danzo, sacrifices his teammate and subordinate without a twinge of mercy or human empathy, and with that act he falls.

Then, even as the empty-hearted vortex of his soul lies bare in words, viciously imparted and without falsification or nostalgia, Sasuke plunges at last into the darkness.

For so long, the memory of Team 7 and the comradeship which tried to answer for his family has held Sasuke in check. He did not kill needlessly, he did not manipulate what friends he had, and he even, in his less guarded moments, felt that he had a team again, and would protect them with his life.

On that day, the last of Sasuke's ties to Konoha is broken. The last chain snaps, his psychosis is assured, and the bonds of humanity which held him back from self-destructive super-nova are severed with a blow.

A momentous day, indeed. But Sasuke sees none of it. Naruto, far away, is just beginning to understand what drives his dreams. The young Uchiha, having become the cold-blooded murderer his brother never was, has closed his eyes utterly. A tactical genius Sasuke might be, but he observes nothing of the passions which drive him, of their inconsistencies and their acidic capacity to eat away his soul.

And that; that is as it should be, or at least as it is. Evil is rarely done knowingly, with calculated intent; true evil is the flailing of a lost soul in the dark, crossing lines invisible and unforeseen. May Sasuke be forgiven for what he has done; a broken child, he can do nothing else.


End file.
